Dev Diary #6: Getting Emotional

Hi everyone! With my going back to my studies full-time at the end of this month, I thought I’d provide a fairly short post outlining what I’ve been up to with Ambience lately.

Overall progress has been going quite smoothly – as I mentioned before, I’ve pretty much finished the cutscenes for the main story, and now I’m just filling in the gaps with text, sprites, and so forth. One feature I’ve added is the use of emotion “callouts” to express a character’s emotions during cutscenes, including shock and sweating (such as from physical exertion):

Another small little addition: when you have allied characters with you in a dungeon, opening the menu now shows a summary of the HP and SP of each team member. While you can’t give team members items to use (e.g. healing items if their HP or SP is low), this new feature allows you to tell at a glance whether a teammate’s in trouble and needs to rest for a bit. I might add the “giving teammates items” feature later on – we’ll see.

Another thing I’ve also been thinking of adding are a larger range of held items. At the moment, the only hold item that makes much of an appearance is that bandanna the Renegades always seem to be wearing – except for the above screenshot, which is a test dungeon anyway. There are a handful of others, including a Fireman’s Hat which has been there since the demo (and in fact has been “around” since 2013!), but I’m hoping to make held items a much more prominent aspect of gameplay than before.

Finally, I’ve also been working on a bunch of character sprites, including sprites for Sage (the old guy in the tweet above), a female player character (finally!!), and a few other NPCs to make things a little more interesting.

The next few weeks might be a little busy, what with uni going back and everything, but I’ll try and keep up the weekly posts for as long as I can before study gets too intense. On the bright side though, it’ll also be good to get some feedback from others on the game, which should be easier once uni resumes.